


Restitution

by PrairieDawn



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Next Generation (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Crack that turned into not as crack while I was writing., Dominion War, There is a canon Trek character here who I will not identify in the tags due to spoilers., This happens to me a lot.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 08:44:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12767301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrairieDawn/pseuds/PrairieDawn
Summary: A fresh off the transport Ensign with a very unusual physiology helps out in Engineering during a skirmish with the Jem'Hadar.One-Shot with a possible returning character.





	Restitution

They were supposed to have fixed this problem decades ago. And in fact, they had, it was just that warp drives, by their very nature, tended to break in ways that bled deadly radiation into the very spaces crew were supposed to use to repair them.

It was a system that had caused dozens of deaths over the last century.

Ensign Helix had been at his emergency station in sickbay, though in his opinion the brief time he had spent cross training in first aid left him qualified to treat the injured only if every other medically trained person on the ship was dead. He would not have even known the nature of the problem in engineering had he not recently been involved with a very pretty, very adventurous human girl who had, like Helix and several others, transferred to the Enterprise a few days ago. Their tryst had left a residual telepathic connection that the two of them had mostly maintained in order to cheat at cards. 

His not really but kind of sort of girlfriend had tapped into their link in a near panic, shortly after a Jem’Hadar torpedo struck the ship a blow that rattled sickbay, throwing boxes off of shelves and briefly dimming the lights. Their connection was muddy with interference and her inexperience with using it at a distance. Something about the warp core, and radiation, and being afraid of dying.

Helix was a xenosociologist, not an engineer by a long shot, but he had more than a passing familiarity with radiation. “Sir,” he said to the doctor on duty. “I am needed in engineering.” The less he explained, the easier it would be for his superior to assume he had simply been ordered elsewhere.

“Go,” he was told. The doctor was busy treating burns on one of his crewmates. He didn’t even turn to look at Helix. 

The Ensign divided his attention from that point on, keeping tabs on the puppet as it ran through the halls toward Engineering. It was slow, but he might need its hands, or its voice. He directed the rest of himself immediately to the warp core, examining the containment field gingerly from subspace before exuding more of his substance into the irradiated area surrounding the core. The more radiation he could absorb into his person, the less would be available to disrupt the dense, but fragile carbon chains and lattices that made up most of the crew. The carbon in his body was mostly fullerenes and could be replaced easily.

Three people entered the containment area just as the puppet reached Engineering. La Forge was one of them. He was accompanied by two other crewman Helix didn’t know. He exuded more of his substance into normal space to surround the three with a green, radiation absorbing haze. He hoped they didn’t mind being inside him. “What’s all this green stuff?” La Forge shouted.

“It’s me,” Helix shouted back through the puppet. “Ensign Helix, Xenosociology. I’m...not entirely corporeal.”

“Radiation levels dropping,” the woman next to him stated. “At these levels we can remain in the area for fifteen minutes without suffering permanent damage.”

“What will happen to you, Ensign, if you keep shielding us?”

Helix was puzzled for a moment, then realized the Chief Engineer was concerned for his safety. “I eat high energy radiation,” he explained. “Tastes like...raspberry sherbet.”

That was of course not literally accurate. While the sophisticated android body he had been supplied by his family weaving was capable of eating and chemically analyzing the molecular components of what he ate, the subjective experiences of tasting carbon molecules and tasting real food were very different. What he had meant was that the particular form of radiation tasted like raspberry sherbet made his girlfriend feel.

La Forge spoke his orders to his assistants clearly and loudly over the din in Engineering. Most were too technical for him to follow, but a shouted, “If we can’t damp that resonance in ten seconds, we’ll have to jettison the core,” caught his attention in the moment with the feeling attached to it, futility, and the image of fiery death or possibly worse, capture.

“On it,” he said to La Forge, pulling the description of the resonance out of his superior officer’s mind. He would apologize for being forward later if either of them lived.

He drew the rest of his substance out of subspace, surrounded the core tightly, and drew energy in a pattern that interfered with the resonance until it subsided. The solid engineers flitted around inside his body, which tickled, but he made sure to hold still and draw radiation into himself and from there, deposit the excess safely into subspace.

He heard another tech shouting in his puppet’s ear, calling him some unpleasant names, but he didn’t have enough substance free to devote to moving it. The puppet was dragged into a corner and left there, inert.

The ship was not destroyed. The Jem’Hadar ship was not so fortunate. It self-destructed once it became clear it would be too damaged to escape. Once La Forge and his team had finished the controlled shutdown of the core for repairs and the radiation levels had dropped enough for him to devote a portion of himself to operating his puppet, he sat and regarded the tech staring at him.

“I thought you were dead,” the tech said. What did you do, faint?” His derision was evident.

La Forge hurried over. “That was quick thinking, Ensign Helix. I’ll expect a writeup on your actions, as the sensor records may be incomplete.”

“Of course, sir.”

He returned the bulk of his substance to subspace, insinuating himself into the shielding around the warp nacelles as had become his habit...it kept him from being dragged behind the ship if it should change speed or direction suddenly.

Rachel ran up to him and grabbed him into a bear hug. “That was amazing Trelane, you should come cross train in Engineering. You’re wasted in Medical.”

“Trelane? Is that a common name where you come from?” La Forge folded his arms, appraising.

Helix’s metaphorical heart fell into his shoes. “No, it’s not. I was a brat when I was thirty. Six, developmentally. I was six.”

“Well, I think you made up for it today. There was no instrumental way to damp that resonance in time.”

“And there wasn’t time to jettison the core, was there.”

“No.” He gestured Helix to follow him as he walked the perimeter of Engineering, noting damage on his PADD. “So how would you feel about cross training as an engineering tech? You’ll need to learn the terminology and schematics...I’d like to look into ways you might be able augment the shields at critical moments, if that turns out to be safe for you...but you’ll also need to learn how to install components lying on your back in a Jeffries tube with the rest of us…”

“Solids?” Helix suggested.

“Yeah, solids.”

“That’s what I’ve got the puppet for,” Helix indicated his humanoid body. It wasn’t the same as the one he had played with as a child. For one thing, it was much more sophisticated. For another, he had selected features that had ideal human male functional proportions and reflected his true developmental age. He had kept the sideburns though. Sideburns were cool.

“Is that all, really?” Rachel teased. “Gotta go. Work to do.” She sashayed off toward a damaged panel.

“So do I. You injured?’

“No. And sickbay wouldn’t help me much.”

“You’d be surprised. I’m sure Dr. Crusher has been working out all the ways you could get hurt and how to fix them since she received your assignment. I have the schematics on this, though,” he indicated the puppet. “Data wanted to have a look at them, with your permission.”

Helix grinned. “Tell him...tell him if he shows me his I’ll show him mine.”

**Author's Note:**

> Now if you haven't, go watch The Squire of Gothos.
> 
> I do not subscribe to the theory that Trelane's people are Q. The Wayfinder Consortium is a loose association of numerous subspecies of cloudform entities who use subspace to travel, feed on various forms of radiation, and in general, use planetary nebulae to breed. Trelane Helix was born in the Helix Nebula, hence his surname. They are as plagued by the Q as solids are.
> 
> They became provisional members of the Federation in 2371.


End file.
